Streamlining Data Centers through IT design, facilities

Dipesh Mangla, Director, CNT

Intro: Dipesh Mangla, Director, CNT started with a vision to create a niche space in the market with his own brand in the data center space and after establishing his foot in the segment from past two years, Dipesh believes to compete big brands like Schneider, Emerson and is sure to be the one of the best companies in the data center space. In an exclusive chat with him, Bhawna Satsangi finds out his mission, vision for the company in Data Center space.

With a mission to provide technological solutions in the IT space, spanning a range of verticals, CNT provides IT infrastructure solutions for a variety of industry verticals. These solutions and services include managed IT services, office automation, E-mail solutions, power solutions, disaster recovery, networking and data center. Excerpts from interview…

What space are you sharing in the Data Center market?

It’s a good space that we are sharing in the data center market. I can’t measure it but definitely we are doing right now 10-12 data centers and this is an average we are doing this point of time. We are elite partner for Schneider which is the biggest company in the world as far as Data center is concerned. We are partners with Schneider but we are making our own data centers as well. When the customer requires the big brand to be associated with, we definitely do that marketing for Schneider and we are making data center for Schneider. Here we are bringing business for data center for Schneider. It is being made by Schneider and we are just doing the marketing for it but having said that we are making our own data center at the customer’s place.

Every organization is looking forward for some ERP solutions/implementations so they need to have some data centre because the infrastructure be it the servers, storage, routers, switching part that has to be taken care because when you are running ERP in your organization you have to have IT infrastructure as it becomes your backbone and in that case you have to have a data center. If something goes down, the critical data goes down then everything goes down. So that is where data center is needed.

How data center has evolved over the years?

Data center is a room where is server, storage, router, will be in place and that has to be taken care so that critical infra has to be created. For this you have to put your IT infra in that particular space. Just think if your server goes down, what will happen to the entire users working in that organization so to make that critical thing, just build the data center in an atmosphere, room where they are kept in a place where the room temperature is adaptable to the machine. The power has to be provided 24×7 to that room. Precision cooling is necessary for data center. Ten years before there was nothing like that and the entire dependency was not on IT but today the entire dependency is on IT so the requirement of Data center has been emerged.

At CNT we create our own Data center at our plant and there’s a complete turnkey projects that we provide to the end users. We provide end-to-end solutions to them.

What are the best brands that are running in the market?

Schneider, Emerson are one of the top brands leading the market today. Definitely they are also creating Data centers like us only. They are not manufacturing and definitely getting may be routers from other companies, procuring high equipments from somewhere, management software to control entire business so they are also sourcing like us. They are the biggest one. Even IBM is also making the data centers. We are advance partners with IBM too. We are also one of the competitors in the segment and what we create is almost half the price of the brands what they sell and giving the same quality.

What benefits do they give?

We are creating data centers here and having the local presence here which is the best part. We are available 24×7 and providing services here. There’s nothing called toll free number. We have our customer executive comfortable talking to queries. We provide internal IT infrastructure. We are providing complete package and is almost at half the price. We are in the market from last 20 years and have become a brand in itself and definitely when we are marketing for other brands so customers also spell a word that we are selling Schneider or Emerson or any other brand so they also trust us. That’s why we started doing this so we created our brand. Definitely they are professional companies but the customer wants some personalize attention and after sale support and look for an organization that really looks for all this and we have been doing this and delivering 24×7 services to our customers. For CNT data center we do not source from Schneider, we source from other brands.

What benefits you get from the brands?

Whatever brands available in the world they have their channel network in India so we source their products to include in our data centers and we are sourcing from only those brands that have excellent numbers in books. We are also dependent on them for the components we are using in the data centers so may be itself we use for cooling. So we only work with companies who provide after sale support because afterwards it’s our company’s respect that will be put at stake so we work with the vendors who has the reputation in the market and whatever benefits they give we try to take this forward to the end customer.

In which verticals you are giving the data center solutions?

We are targeting every vertical. Be it manufacturing, FMCG, BPO, Government Education, Finance, Media, Insurance, banking, Capital markets, Software Developments, Wealth Management and Retail. All these organizations are implementing ERP. Definitely we give solutions as per the requirements of the users.

What is the potential of data center market?

It is huge because most of the companies don’t have ERP solutions placed right now and keen on coming on ERP and as they are coming on that they will come on data center. They have option to have data center at their place or they can have data center on cloud and have to include third party for this who can provide this facility, space into their data centers.

What is the revenue you are generating from the data center space?

Almost we are generating 8-10% of the total revenue that is Rs. 100 crore.

Which is your favourite brand in data center and why?

We have our own brand so nothing called the liking of any other brand. Definitely we are not saying that we are the best, we are just one of the best. It’s only through the word of mouth that we are getting more and more business every year and people trusting our brand.